Total locked-in syndrome is characterized by tetraplegia, anarthria and paralysis of eye motility. In this study, consciousness was detected in a 21-year-old woman who presented a total locked-in syndrome ... [more ▼]

Total locked-in syndrome is characterized by tetraplegia, anarthria and paralysis of eye motility. In this study, consciousness was detected in a 21-year-old woman who presented a total locked-in syndrome after a basilar artery thrombosis (49 days post-injury) using an active event-related paradigm. The patient was presented sequences of names containing the patient's own name and other names. The patient was instructed to count her own name or to count another target name. Similar to 4 age- and gender-matched healthy controls, the P3 response recorded for the voluntarily counted own name was larger than while passively listening. This P3 response was observed 14 days before the first behavioral signs of consciousness. This study shows that our active event-related paradigm allowed to identify voluntary brain activity in a patient who would behaviorally be diagnosed as comatose. [less ▲]

Some patients with relatively selective hippocampal damage have shown proportionate recall and recognition deficits. Moreover, familiarity as well as recollection have been found to be impaired in some of ... [more ▼]

Some patients with relatively selective hippocampal damage have shown proportionate recall and recognition deficits. Moreover, familiarity as well as recollection have been found to be impaired in some of these patients. In contrast, other patients with apparently similar damage presented with relatively preserved recognition despite having severely impaired recall, and some of these patients have been shown to have preserved familiarity. We report here the case of an amnesic patient who suffered bilateral hippocampal damage and temporoparietal atrophy after carbon monoxide poisoning. On tests matched for difficulty, his recall performance was more severely impaired than his recognition memory, for verbal as well as for visual materials. Moreover, he performed within the range of healthy matched subjects on nine recognition tests out of ten. In a task using the process dissociation procedure, the patient’s familiarity was preserved although his recollection was impaired. These findings indicate that recall and recognition memory can be dissociated in amnesic patients with hippocampal lesions even when temporoparietal cortical atrophy is also present. [less ▲]

Although phonological processing is generally considered to be a proficiency in Williams syndrome (WS), there are very few studies which have extensively explored phonological processing abilities in WS ... [more ▼]

Although phonological processing is generally considered to be a proficiency in Williams syndrome (WS), there are very few studies which have extensively explored phonological processing abilities in WS. In this study, we re-assessed phonological processing in WS by exploring verbal STM and phonological awareness abilities in 4 children with WS (CA: 10-12 years) and two control groups, one matched for chronological age (CA) and the other matched for verbal mental age (VA). Our results confirm and extend previous claims of preserved phonological STM in WS by showing specifically preserved STM performance for non-words, compared to both VA and CA control groups. However, we observed that this was the case only for non-words where support of phonological and lexico-semantic knowledge was minimized, with reduced phonological and lexico-semantic effects on STM performance. Furthermore, a more direct assessment of phonological processing abilities through phonological awareness tasks showed impaired performance for the 4 WS children. Our data confirm that STM for non-words represents a real strength in. WS but they do not support previous assumptions of a more general preservation of phonological processing abilities in WS. Implications for impaired and preserved cognitive processes underlying verbal STM and phonological awareness abilities in WS are discussed. [less ▲]

This study explored the ability of a severe amnesic patient (AC) to acquire new vocabulary words. We compared AC's knowledge of words entered into the French lexicon during three different periods: before ... [more ▼]

This study explored the ability of a severe amnesic patient (AC) to acquire new vocabulary words. We compared AC's knowledge of words entered into the French lexicon during three different periods: before 1920, between 1965 and 1985, and after 1986 (i.e. after the onset of his amnesia). AC's knowledge was assessed by asking him to give, for each word, its definition (word-definition task), the general domain Io which the word belonged ('domain' task), and to generate a sentence containing the word (sentence-generation task). Finally, we administered a recognition task in which AC had to select, for each word, its correct definition amongst four definitions. For all of these tasks, the results showed that AG's performance was similar to that of four control subjects matched for age, education, and profession. In particular, there was no difference with regard to AC's knowledge of words entered into the language after the onset of his amnesia. Therefore, these results indicate that, despite his profound amnesia, AC was able to learn normally new vocabulary words. More generally, they confirm that, at least is some cases, semantic learning can be spared in amnesia. [less ▲]